The World Is What It Is

A peek behind the curtain

By Allan Turner |
December 13, 2008

Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul is a cad. A snobbish, arguably racist dyspeptic who for decades tormented both his devoted wife and adoring Argentine mistress — a man who chided others for being fat — Naipaul in his 76 years has built an unenviable reputation as one who is unafraid to plumb the nastiest depths of misanthropy. Along the way, of course, he has crafted a host of fine novels, two of which, A House for Mr. Biswas and A Bend in the River, might fairly be enshrined as literature. His forays into nonfiction, opinionated travel books on India, the Caribbean and the southern United States, enlighten or enrage but never fail to generate thought and discussion. There, in four paragraphs, you have what Patrick French has to tell you in 487 pages of his plodding, voyeuristic biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. Altogether, one can glean a truer sense of what makes Naipaul extraordinary from his early works of autobiographical fiction than from French’s tiresome chronicling of the writer’s comings and goings, alliances and betrayals, dinner dates, snits, funks and fulminations. French’s effort — a biography written, astoundingly, with Naipaul’s blessing and cooperation — has all the resonance of a datebook. Born in the backwater sugar cane hamlet of Chaguanas, Trinidad, in August 1932, Naipaul grew to maturity in a society misshaped by British colonialism. His maternal grandfather, putatively a Brahman, had arrived amid a 19th century wave of indentured Indian laborers. His father, a sometime journalist with literary aspirations, struggled vainly to assert himself in a domestic world dominated by his mother-in-law and her sons. Though a member of a despised minority, Naipaul established himself as a young achiever. In Port of Spain, the island nation’s relatively cosmopolitan capital, he attended Queens Royal College, a very British secondary school, and from there won a coveted scholarship to Oxford. His departure — loosely described in Miguel Street, his first work of fiction — was transforming. In England, Naipaul met, courted and married Pat Hale, a fellow university student whose working-class family loathed the mix-race pairing. From the start, the marriage was flat, and Naipual wasted little time telling his bride that he never really wanted to marry her. As he diligently pursued a literary career, beginning as a writer with the BBC, Naipaul avidly sought extramarital encounters with prostitutes. It’s axiomatic that one should not judge artists’ work by their conduct. But in this case the random infidelities do seem germane if only because they provide a glimpse of Naipaul’s attitudes toward women, on whom, as others have noted, he seems inordinately dependent. Hale, who remained devoted to Naipaul until her death from breast cancer in 1996, learned of his association with prostitutes through the press. Beyond those triflings, however, loomed the grand betrayal of which Hale was well aware: Naipaul’s 20-year dalliance with his Argentine mistress, Margaret Gooding. Gooding, daughter of an Argentine publishing executive, left her husband and children for the Trinidadian author. She traveled the world with him in a tempestuous relationship that sometimes descended into violence. Though Gooding hoped for marriage, in the end, she was dumped. Just months after Naipaul scattered his wife’s cremated remains, he married for a second time, to a Pakistani journalist some decades his junior. Allan Turner is a reporter for the Chronicle.